Hosted by NCWARN, on Tuesday March 24th, 2026, Dr. Rania Masri (NCEJN co-director) gave a talk on the climate and environmental impacts of imperialism. You can watch the talk here.
I want to start by grounding us in a simple but often ignored truth: environmental destruction is not accidental. It is not collateral damage. It is, very often, deliberate. It is strategic. And it has long been used as a tool of domination.
… This topic is deeply personal to me. Imperialism. Ecocide. – deeply personal to me. I am, like many people that you know, a victim of imperialism. I have known wars. My land has known wars. And my land has known ecocide. And knows it still.
It is horrific. What is happening is pure horror.
We’re talking about mass murder. Starvation. Destruction of livelihoods. Uprooting of trees. Polluting rivers. Blackening the skies.
Ecocide is the destruction of ecosystems — not just nature in isolation, but entire social and ecological relationships. It’s the tearing apart of land, water, plants, animals, and the human communities that are inseparable from them.
Why?
I have often asked myself that question. Why? There is no reason for it all. There is enough for all of us, to share, to live, to thrive.
But there isn’t enough for capitalism. For profit. For exploitation. And the philosophy of hunger and monopolistic greed reaches its zenith with the desire for erasure, for deliberate ecocide to erase all that is, including the people who tend the land.
To understand ecocide, is to understand capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit. an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit. What does that cause? A system requires constant new markets for goods, new access to raw materials.
Constant expansion. A cancer. With profit as the goal.
In violation of the laws of thermodynamics. Of the laws of nature.
And where we are now – late stage capitalism – this advanced phase of the capitalist system where profit accumulation intensifies at the cost of social equity, labor rights, and environmental sustainability. A system increasingly detached from human needs and more focused on financial markets, corporate growth, and speculative investment. A time when everything is commodified.
For profit. For exploitation. For erasure.
Capitalism. Powered by militarism. With the objective of expansion and further control, the highest stage of capitalism, i.e. imperialism. Expansion requires enforcement. Maintaining control over foreign lands requires increased military presence, US bases around the world, and suppression of resistance – both domestically and abroad.
This encourages militarism: Growth in standing armies; Expansion of military budgets, which the US Department of War budget is now more than $1 trillion with 800 military bases around the world; and a normalization of war.
All of which is dependent on fossil fuel, first coal and now oil.
Capitalism drives expansion by creating a constant search for new markets and resources. Imperialism secures that expansion by establishing control and influence abroad. Militarism enforces and protects these interests, using military power to ensure stability. In turn, militarism feeds capitalism through defense industries and government spending. The loop then repeats, driving further expansion.
This is inevitable within capitalism.
Malcolm X In a 1964 speech, he said “you can’t have capitalism without racism.” He saw racism not as a flaw in the system, but as one of its core operating principles. Racism is needed to allow for the ‘othering.’ Malcolm X reminded us that capitalism grew out of enslaved African labor and genocidal settler-colonialism; racism was foundational to how the system developed. Racism further justifies economic inequity; portraying Black people as inferior made it easier to pay them less, deny them jobs, and keep them in poor conditions while maintaining profits for those in power. Capitalism also benefits from dividing workers by race. Poor white workers, for example, might identify with whiteness instead of recognizing shared economic interests with Black workers, which prevents unified resistance. Malcolm X also connected racism in the U.S. to global capitalism, reminding us that people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were – and continue to be – similarly exploited by Western powers in a racialized world system.
We need racism to justify sacrifice zones.
Naomi Klein explained this clearly:
“fossil fuels are so inherently dirty and toxic that they require sacrificial people and places: people whose lungs and bodies can be sacrificed to work in the coal mines, people whose lands and water can be sacrificed to open-pit mining and oil spills. … Fossil fuel sacrifice zones dot the globe. Take the Niger Delta, poisoned with an Exxon Valdez-worth of spilled oil every year, a process Ken Saro-Wiwa, before he was murdered by his government, called ‘ecological genocide’. The executions of community leaders, he said, were ‘all for Shell’.
Fossil fuels require sacrifice zones: they always have. And you can’t have a system built on sacrificial places and sacrificial people unless intellectual theories that justify their sacrifice exist and persist: from Manifest Destiny to Terra Nullius to Orientalism, from backward hillbillies to backward Indians.”
We know that ecocide refers to severe, widespread, or long-term destruction of ecosystems—to the point that the survival and well-being of human and non-human life in that area is seriously threatened.
We know the examples: Massive deforestation. Oil spills and industrial pollution. Destruction of rivers, oceans, or biodiversity systems. Climate system destabilization
And when we think about it, the link between imperialism and ecocide is clear: rooted in extraction, control, and unequal power.
The link is present, through economic sanctions, the silent killing. The United States and Europe have long used unilateral sanctions as a tool of imperial power, to discipline and even destroy Global South governments that seek to shake off Western domination. New research – published in the Lancet – shows that US and European sanctions have killed 38 million people since 1970.
Why? So to pressure the people to rise up against their governments and cause regime change. Why? For control of resources. (These actions, by the way, are the very definition of the US legal code on terrorism.)
The link between imperialism and ecocide is also clear directly:
To externalize environmental costs, by shifting environmental damage elsewhere, Pollution-heavy industries are located in weaker or poorer regions, within the US and around the world. Local populations bear ecological and health costs.
And to steal resources. Such as the Under Development of Africa by western European states. Or through direct control of resources and trade routes through wars.
War damages ecosystems (bombing, chemical use, infrastructure destruction).
From 1962 to 1971, the U.S. Air Force sprayed nearly 19 million gallons of herbicides in Vietnam, of which at least 11 million gallons was Agent Orange, in a military project called Operation Ranch Hand. An additional 1.6 million gallons of herbicides was applied to base perimeters, roadways, and communication lines by helicopter and surface sprayings from riverboats, trucks, or backpacks. Why? Officially for (1) defoliation of trees and plants to improve observation, and (2) destruction of crops for the people of the land.
That war led to the deaths of more than 3.3 million Vietnamese and nearly 60,000 members of the U.S. armed forces. An additional 3 million people were affected by the spraying and lingering contamination. Fifty years after the Vietnam War, researchers are still struggling to document the long-term health effects of the massive spraying of Agent Orange and other herbicides. Agent Orange has been linked to reports of birth defects in communities exposed to the spraying, and the chemical can affect brain development in exposed children.
The testing of these chemicals in Vieques Puerto Rico. on the people and the land. The island was used by the U.S. Navy as a training and testing ground for war for 60 years. Three million pounds of napalm, depleted uranium, and other toxic chemicals, including Agent Orange and Agent White, were tested on the land.
Since the war on Vietnam, the US has directly launched bombs, missiles, naval gunfire, or drone strikes against at least 26 countries! This list does not include the bombing campaigns that were supported with US military aid and US weapons, such as against El Salvador and Nicaragua!
- Laos (massive covert bombing campaign, 1964 – 1973)
- Cambodia (covert bombing campaigns, 1969 – 1970)
- Vietnam (naval gunfire raids, 1972)
- Nicaragua (CIA-directed covert attacks, 1981-1992)
- Lebanon (naval and air bombardment, 1982-1984)
- Grenada (invasion airstrikes and naval bombardment, 1983)
- Libya (airstrikes, 1986)
- Iran (shelled Iranian oil platforms; largest US naval surface engagement since WWII, 1987-1988)
- Panama (invasion, with airstrikes and ground assault, 1989-1990)
- Iraq (massive 5-week aerial bombing campaign, 1991)
- Kuwait (aerial bombing of Iraqi forces, 1991)
- Iraq (cruise missile strikes, 1993)
- Somalia (aircraft and helicopter airstrikes and ground attacks, 1993)
- Bosnia and Herzegovina (airstrikes and bombardment, 1994-1995)
- Iraq (cruise missile strikes, 1996)
- Sudan (cruise missile strikes on a pharmaceutical factory, 1998)
- Afghanistan (cruise missile strikes, 1998)
- Serbia & Montenegro (US- NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, 1999)
- Afghanistan (Full-scale war – bombing, drone strikes, and air support. At least 241,000 killed. 2001-2021)
- Pakistan (Extensive drone strike campaign, 2004-present)
- Yemen (drone and airstrike campaigns begin, 2002-present)
- Iraq (invasion and air campaign, 2003-2011)
- Somalia (expanded drone campaign, 2007-present)
- Yemen (drone and airstrike campaign, 2009)
- Libya (US- NATO intervention, 2011)
- Niger (drone-linked operations, 2010- present)
- Mali (drone operations, 2010-present)
- Syria (airstrikes and bombings, 2014-present)
- Iraq (airstrikes, 2014-present)
- Libya (airstrikes, 2015)
- Philippines (drone strikes, 2017)
- Iran (drone strikes, 2020)
- Yemen (drone and airstrike campaign, 2024-present)
- Nigeria (airstrikes and drone operations, 2025-present)
- Iran (bombers and missiles dropped in 2025)
- Venezuela (large-scale military strikes and drone strikes, 2025-present)
- Caribbean Sea & Eastern Pacific (military strikes, 2025-present)
- Ecuador (joint military operations, 2026)
- Iran (full-scale war, 2026)
Families. Killed.
Cities. Neighborhoods. Destroyed.
Hospitals. Schools. Factories. Bombed.
Polluting Weapons used.
Of its 249 years of independence, this country has waged war for 230 years – 92% of its history.
None of this is in the past.
And now, we are 25 days into the US/Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon. This criminal war includes Israel’s bombing of Iran’s oil infrastructure. The toxic chemicals spread by airstrikes on five fossil fuel installations around the city could lead to acid rain and damage the skin and lungs. The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said: “Damage to petroleum facilities in Iran risks contaminating food, water and air – hazards that can have severe health impacts especially on children, older people, and people with pre-existing medical conditions.” The soil and water supplies around Tehran were already beginning to be contaminated by the fallout from one weekend’s explosions.
At least 1,500 people have been killed in Iran from US/Israeli attacks. Thirty percent of whom are children.
And 5 million tons of carbon dioxide emitted in just the first 14 days of the US/Israeli war on Iran. We are now on day 25.
And to support these war crimes, we have US military bases and testing sites which degrade land and water. More than 800 military bases around the world. And testing sites around the world, including in the U.S..
From 1945 to 1962, the U.S. conducted more than 100 atmospheric weapons tests in the U.S. and its territories, causing widespread radioactive fallout which increased cancer risks and other health issues. New research reveals that the radioactive fallout is responsible for 340,000 to 690,000 American deaths from 1951 to 1973.
According to the Pentagon, there are 40,000 contaminated military sites in the US. That’s 40 million acres in the US,
92% (651 of 710) military bases across the US have elevated levels of PFAS in their soil and water supplies And North Carolina has the largest military base in the world!Fort Bragg is 163,000 acres!
Why?
Because in the pursuit of profit, certain people are deemed disposable. Erased.
And then there is the complete erasure of people and their land through settler colonialism. Theft of the land. Removal of the people.
Such as here. In the US.
When European settlers arrived in the Americas, historians estimate there were over 10 million people from First Nations living here. By 1900, their estimated population was under 300,000. They were subjected to many different forms of violence, all with the intention of destroying the community. The U.S. Army conducted numerous “genocidal massacres,” killings intended to send a message to others. In the late 1800s, blankets from smallpox patients were distributed to Native Americans in order to spread disease. European settlers were paid for each Penobscot person they killed. In the 19th century, 4,000 Cherokee people died on the Trail of Tears, a forced march from the southern U.S. to Oklahoma.
And of course – The Great American Buffalo Slaughter – the dramatic decline of the American bison population, from an estimated sixty to seventy million in 1853 to just a few thousand by the early 1880s. The U.S. Army actively supported the mass killings as part of a strategy to force Native Americans into reservations, providing ammunition to hunters and promoting the idea that reducing buffalo populations would help “settle the Indian question.”
This is ongoing. From the 19th century to today, the U.S. government has violated treaties; prioritized economic and industrial interests; and ignored Indigenous sovereignty – throughout the continental US and Hawaii. Modern infrastructure projects — pipelines and telescopes alike — are framed as contemporary expressions of the same colonial logic that drove land seizure, forced removal, and environmental destruction in earlier eras. pipelines are the latest development in a centuries-long system of Indigenous land exploitation and environmental injustice.
To justify all this, a philosophy of white supremacy is built and encouraged. To be better than. To dispose of others. To invisibilize them. To teach racism and arrogance and hate to justify their removal, their erasure, their killing.
Imagine if the settlers arrived on this land willing to learn from others, to live with others, to share, rather than to remove and subvert. Imagine the philosophies we would have respected. The land. The animals. The rivers.
And the same has been repeated in Palestine. The U.S. has white supremacy, and the Zionists have Jewish supremacy.
The founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzel, said in 1896: “Supposing we were obliged to clear a country of wild beasts – [referring to the Indigenous Palestinians] – we would organize a large and active hunting party, drive the animals together, and throw a melinite bomb into their midst.”
Yosef Weitz, Director, Jewish National Fund Land Settlement Committee, said in 1932, ‘The only solution is a Land of Israel without Arabs. Not one village must be left, not one tribe.”
David Ben-Gurion, First Prime Minister of Israel, said, “We must expel Arabs and take their places. … We shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”
The erasure of Palestinians from the land of Palestine began in the 1940s and is ongoing.
Moshe Dayan, Israeli military commander said in 1969, “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab-Palestinian villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”
Every single Israeli prime minister, president, and Zionist leader has voiced clear intent to erase the Palestinian people from our lands, either by forced expulsion or military violence. More than 100 years of genocidal intent against my people.
Imagine all that was lost. Taken away. To create a monopolistic supremacy over the land and to remove the indigenous people, rather than to co-exist.
Sometimes I can’t breathe when I remember all that we had.
In Palestine today, we find the most visible example of imperialism and ecocide – where genocide is clear and ongoing. I quote Andreas Malm, The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth, here:
”One component of the definition of genocide is the ‘physical destruction in whole or in part’ of the targeted group of people; and in Gaza, a central category is precisely that of physical destruction. In just the first two months of the ongoing genocide, Gaza was subjected to utter and complete destruction. In just the first two months, the Wall Street Journal reported that the destruction of Gaza equalled or surpassed that of Dresden and other German cities during the Second World War.
The emblematic image is that of a house smashed into pieces and survivors frantically digging through the rubble. If they are lucky, a boy or a girl all covered in dust might be pulled out from the mass of debris.
The estimate now is that at least 12,000 dead bodies remain to be extracted from the pulverised houses of Gaza. 860,000 killed, directly and indirectly.
While it has never before approached the scale we are now seeing, this is not exactly the first time the Palestinians have experienced this sort of thing. The script can be found in the 1948 Plan Dalet, where Zionist forces were instructed in the art of ‘destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble)’. During the Nakba of 1948, it was commonplace for these forces to invade a village during the night and systematically dynamite one house after another with families still inside them.”
This has never come to an end. The original act of destroying the houses over the heads of their inhabitants is repeated again and again: in al-Majdal in 1950, from which the people were deported to Gaza, to the blockade in 2007, to the bombings of 2008, 2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021
Mowing the lawn is what the Israelis called it.And, now, an ongoing genocide since 2023.
Destroying homes over the heads of their inhabitants. Here is how Liyana Badr described the Israeli bombings in 1982, from A Balcony over the Fakihani,
I saw piles of concrete, stones, torn clothes scattered about, shattered glass, little pieces of cotton wool, fragments of metal, buildings destroyed or leaning crazily (…) White dust smothered the district, and through the gray of the smoke loomed the gutted shells of blocks and the debris of houses razed to the earth. (…) Everything there was mixed up together. Cars were upside down, papers whirling in the sky. Fire. And smoke. The end of the world.
As Andreas Malm writes:
This is the end of the world that never ends: fresh rubble is always poured out over the Palestinians. Destruction is the constitutive experience of Palestinian life because the essence of the Zionist project is the destruction of Palestine. And the erasure of Palestinians.
This time, unlike in 1948 or 1950, however, the destruction of Palestine is playing out against the backdrop of a different, but related process of destruction: namely, that of the climate system of this planet. Climate breakdown is the process of ecosystems being physically destroyed, from the Arctic to Australia. To take but one example, the Amazon is caught up in a spiral of dieback that might end with it becoming a treeless savanna. The Amazon rainforest has been standing for 65 million years. Now, in the span of a few short decades, global warming – together with deforestation, the original form of ecological destruction – is pushing the Amazon towards the tipping point beyond which it would cease to exist. If the Amazon were to lose its forest cover – a dizzying thought, but entirely within the realm of a possible near future – it would be a different kind of Nakba. The immediate victims would, of course, be the indigenous and afrodescendent and other people of the Amazon, some 40 million in all, who would, in the most likely scenario, see fires rip through their forest and turn it into smoke and so live through the end of a world.
When fossil fuel companies extract their goods and put them up for combustion, they do not intend to kill anyone in particular. They know, however, that these commodities will, as a matter of certainty, kill people – it might be people in Libya, or in Congo, or in Bangladesh, or in Peru; it is of no consequence to them.
‘If you’re doing something that hurts somebody, and you know it, you’re doing it on purpose’, prosecutor Steve Schleicher said in his closing argument against Derek Chauvin, later convicted for the murder of George Floyd; the same applies here. Indeed, the violence of fossil fuel production becomes more lethal and more purposeful for every passing year.
The destruction of Palestine and the destruction of the Earth play out in broad daylight. There is a surfeit of documentation of both. Knowledge of the two processes and how they unfold in real time is superabundant: we know everything we need to know about the catastrophes, and yet the capitalist core keeps rushing fuel to the fireplaces and bombs to Gaza.
The genocide in Gaza provides a useful object lesson in callousness. In the climate catastrophe, the lives of non-white multitudes in the global South do not count. They are expendable, valueless.
In the land of Palestine, the lives of Palestinians do not count. They are completely expendable. Like so many others. They have no value, none at all. This is the lesson we have learnt, once again, in the past three years – never has it been demonstrated with such extreme cruelty and indeed exterminationist bloodlust as now. Hundreds of thousands killed. And still being killed.
The genocide then curves back on the warming world and reconfirms the expendability and valuelessness of non-white lives.”
Yet is it very good for the business of ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Big Oil & Big Tech, and General Electric, Raytheon…
As Francesca Albanese, United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, reported, “the profits have increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.” Raytheon. Lockheed Martin. Pegasus. IBM. Hewlett Packard. Microsoft. MIT. Elbit. Palantir. Caterpillar. Volvo. Hyundai. Barclays. BP. Chevron. AirBnB— These are some of the Arms dealers, big tech, construction, agribusiness, tourism, banks, pension funds, universities, insurers, and charities – complicit in the genocide. I would add the media that justifies and promotes their propaganda. From the NYT to the BBC to the AP and beyond.
“In Gaza, where it has been going on for decades, that destruction has now reached apocalyptic proportions: the people who have not yet died from the bombs live in a wasteland of contaminated soil, undrinkable water, orchards and fields packed into dust, garbage and debris mixed in a hyper-polluted strip of land in which human life is being rendered impossible for the long term. Ecocide here fuse with genocide in a manner never seen before. Bosnia was not a less habitable land after 1995 than before 1992. Rwandan soil and water and air went relatively unscathed through the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. But will people ever be able to live again in Gaza?”
Even before the genocide of 2023 began against the Palestinians in Gaza, only 3% of the freshwater resources were not contaminated due to the Israeli blockade and repeated bombardments
Israeli “Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” and he also said:
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant repeated that ‘what we did in Gaza can also be done in Beirut’.
And now the Israeli military is doing just that to southern Lebanon and Beirut. What Israel is doing now is a continuation of what they have done in Gaza. With US support and US bombs. 1 in 7 is displaced. More than 1000 people killed by Israel, as of this moment. 52 villages destroyed.
What does this mean? What does war mean? I wonder how I can bring it home to folks who have had the privilege of not living through war.
For those of us living in the diaspora, we scour the news every day as we try to remember who of our loved ones live where, on which street corner and in what neighborhood so we can call them to make sure they’re okay. As we hear their anguish, as they live the sound of bombs, as they call, frantic that their home has been bombed and they don’t know where to go.
It means, in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Iran, and elsewhere, the hope to find loved ones still alive under the rubble. It means living with no security, not from the skies or the land Being taken from a house, to a tent, to another tent, again and again. And constantly being told that you are guilty, the crime is yours, and that defending yourself is terrorism.
And what upsets me is that all of this is so damn unnecessary. We can build a different way. We do not have to live this way!
A world not grounded in capitalism and racism.
Capitalism is based on greed. Based on more. Based on not being satiated.
Like ecocide. Dismissal of life.
And settler colonialism, an arm of imperialism, is the erasure of the people, the land, the animals, to replace them with foreign hegemony.
All against the natural order of life.
Throughout – – we are unseen – we, the people of the land, like the other animals, like the plants, the rocks, the mountains, the trees, are unseen, or, when seen at all, dismissed as inferior, savages, terrorist.
The land is not incidental. It is the target. Destroying ecosystems breaks resistance, culture, and continuity.
So what is our role here? We who live in North Carolina, what is our role amidst all of this horror?
I am deeply appreciative of NC WARN, for being one of the few environmental justice organizations in NC to say this is important. I am deeply appreciative of NC WARN – for stepping out of the silo, and for opening this discussion.
How can we battle energy prices and climate change, if we don’t recognize their relationship to capitalism, to imperialism, and to the consequences of ecocide and genocide, all justified by racism and supremacist idealogies?
How can we fight to win if we fight in silos?
And yet the Big Greens in this country still don’t talk about war.
The Nature Conservancy actually works with the US Military, and last year they proudly acknowledged that they had “received $1.616 Million from the Lockheed Martin Corp – to Secure Water, Strengthen Communities and Improve Local Economies.”
The audacity. They call themselves the nature conservancy!
And The Sierra Club, one of this country’s oldest, if not the oldest, environmental organizations, wants to concern itself with climate change but to ignore militarism. Code Pink wrote to Sierra Club last year and this year again, and said, “The U.S. military is the largest institutional polluter in the world. … If we don’t address militarism and the global impact of the war machine, we will not be able to address the climate crisis. If we don’t break down the silos between the largest anti-war movement in decades and the environmental movement that ultimately has the same targets, we risk everything. To save the planet, we need to cut the Pentagon, and we need to follow the lead of struggles in the Global South around the world, which have resisted militarism and are local struggles for the land.”
I believe we can strike free from the U.S. government’s insatiable hunger for war, military conquest, and domination. It starts by wanting to, and by envisioning what this country would look like once we reject militarism, and how our organizing structures would change once we reject silos.
What do we want to build in place of the fossil fuel infrastructure? What do we want to build in place of capitalism? What do we want to build in place of racist, supremacist colonies? What kind of philosophies do we want to uphold and uplift? And what of the humility we want to return to our society so we can bow our heads to the trees instead of uproot them?
A world without war, a world without disposability.
A world with equity and love.
This is what I ask you: How can we organize together to actually fight to win, and save what is left of our earth?
